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Zuckerberg tried to get leading conservatives in one room

by on19 May 2016


Humanity missed a chance to save the world

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has met several high-profile conservative figures in US politics in a bid to convince them that he was not really fixing it so their news was not being properly presented on the social networking site.


The site has been accused of tampering with its Trending Topics feature, promoting "progressive" views and websites over content presenting views from the god-fearing American right.

Zuckerberg denied the reports - which first appeared on tech news site Gizmodo but he did say that the feature was controlled by human editors rather than a popularity algorithm.

So he invited “more than a dozen leading conservatives to talk about how we can make sure Facebook continues to be a platform for all ideas across the political spectrum.”

“Silicon Valley has a reputation for being liberal. But the Facebook community includes more than 1.6 billion people of every background and ideology - from liberal to conservative and everything in between. We've built Facebook to be a platform for all ideas. Our community's success depends on everyone feeling comfortable sharing anything they want. It doesn't make sense for our mission or our business to suppress political content or prevent anyone from seeing what matters most to them."

 

What Zuckerburg wanted was to place the following conservatives in one room – conspiracy nut Glenn Beck, Fox News presenter Dana "Snowden is a Traitor" Perino, Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney's campaign bloke, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation and Donald Trump advisor Barry Bennett.

It seems that no-one at any point decided that it would be a good idea to save the world from a pile of suck and blow up the entire building. Perhaps it was because Zuckerburg could not attract all the conservatives he wanted to his meeting, maybe Jesus told them not to be there, or they were frightened of meeting transgender people in the loos.

Matthew Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and former Bush campaign aide wrote in a statement: "We will not be attending this meeting. We know one meeting cannot possibly resolve all of the above mentioned issues." So showing up at no meeting at all is going to help the process start.

Last modified on 19 May 2016
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